The communications infrastructure is a critical component of any economy. All of today's important scientific, business and consumer applications rely on the telecommunications infrastructure. Since internet services are becoming ubiquitous, more and more businesses and consumers are relying on their internet connections for both voice and data transport needs. The amount of traffic transported on the network continues to grow. Each component of the network is shared by a large number of businesses and consumers. Thus, when network events happen, a significant amount of traffic is impacted. Often a single trouble produces multiple failure events. Network managers review the trouble tickets for route cause analysis. It is very important to identify the related events and remedy the situation as quickly as possible. Traditional event correlation methods require the network provider to define each possible network event, to register each network asset and to establish all the network specific topological relationships. The correlation rules must be defined for every connected asset, which is very time consuming as the size of the network increases.
Thus, there is a need for a method for event correlation that does not depend on repeated and exhaustive capturing of detailed knowledge of each asset in each correlation rule, a complete knowledge of all the possible events, and correlation rules for specific network topologies.